to moving gently between inner, and outer, seasons

The leaves are changing color, and I’m taking long walks and lighting even more candles than usual. I’m listening to songs that feel soft and warm. I’m reaching for my knitting needles, and poetry books, and I climb in bed earlier and earlier in the evening.

I wake up in the morning feeling sore and tired. Could it be the muscles that have been stretching to take new form? Could it be the physical manifestation of all the ways in which I am growing and changing, expanding my capacity to take on different, softer, more malleable, shapes?

My current inner season matches that of the world around me. I am drawing inward after a two weeks filled with blooming ideas and a steady flow of creative expression. As I move toward my inner winter, I hear familiar worry voices and I watch myself from just outside myself, forming the cocoon that will hold me for the next two weeks. The summers of my inner cycle feel so short.

In these transition periods between the outward expression, moving into a quieter, closer in space, I wonder if I did enough, made enough, said enough, was enough. I lay these familiar questions down on the page to rest, knowing this is not the time to answer them in any other way than with an abundance of reassurance: Yes, I was enough. I did enough. This is enough.

I let these words wrap their warmth around me. Then I lay my body on the floor in my living room, taking a tiny moment in the middle of the day to reconnect with the present moment through my breath, finding the tiniest bit of ease simply through the light of awareness.

A moment between – 35mm film